Silence

I never read Lord of the Flies - I had to go and look it up on one of those GCSE pass notes sites today to clarify what I thought I knew about it. (And isn't that weird - how is it possible to know so much about a book you've never read? In the same way as wondering how you know all those bits of classical music you could never identify?) I did this because I was thinking about bullying. Bullying exists as part of a whole spectrum of behaviour, among a whole group of people. It isn't usually just one-on-one agressor and victim. Around those two are a widening circle of others and I'd range them from one end to the other. Aggressor over here on your left, victim on the far right, let's say, and spreading between are the others - starting with eager followers, moving through those who might join in and those who will take advantage of the atmosphere created. As you pass the midway point, you head into those who stick their fingers in their ears and go la-la-la ... the ones who aren't here. They don't want to get involved. But they are. By their silence, they normalise the behaviour of those on the left side of the spectrum. They isolate the victim, out there on the right by themselves. 'It must be me,' the victim thinks. 'They're not attacking anyone else, so this must be my fault, for attracting it, or for being unable to stand up to it. I must be reacting wrongly. In fact, I must be over-reacting - no one else seems to think it's bad or they'd say something. It's my fault.' So he or she is also silenced. I read through the background of Lord of the Flies, most of which I knew by this weird cultural osmosis, and it left me feeling even more bleak than when I started. I like to see the good in everyone, or life would be altogether too dark. But there are times when all I can see is that vision of children escaping civilisation and the good ones going under. Then I remembered: 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' Edmund Burke, Irish political philosopher from the 18th century. It cheers me up to think that three centuries ago someone was able to say it so elegantly and succinctly, because of course that means it's not just me who thinks this way, and rages against it, and then I start to remember all those who have spoken up, at great personal cost, and I decide the world isn't so bad. It's a spectrum, still.

Making an Impact

Motivation vs plot. My strength is in creating characters and themes, in revealing what drives someone's thoughts; what I find hard is plot, sheer, simple driving onwards of action. Often that's why my short stories grind to a halt halfway through - I need the action to carry forwards an otherwise motionless piece of writing. At the moment, I'm considering the impact of one character's actions on another. I usually write short stories with a small cast and in writing something longer, I'm having to manage more people and how they inter-act. In real life, we all see things in different ways - as children, we see life from our own perspective and have to learn, slowly, that others will see things differently. Theory of mind, it's called. Those on the autistic spectrum struggle with it. It's also the reason why small children make those delicious comments that assume you know what they know, and they can't get inside another child's head to see that they might want that particular toy too and will be upset to have it snatched away. But even as adults, we can't see the impact our actions will have because we don't know where others have started from. The person we let out in the traffic queue may be having a seriously bad day and you lighten her mood or she may be on her phone and barely even notice your Random Act of Kindness. My real life examples: I regularly collect a prescription for someone else. Because it's a controlled drug, even the prescription has to be collected from a special place, rather than being put in the post. Each time I send in the repeat form, I wait the allotted five days, a bit more for courtesy, and then I have to start chasing it. I get answer phones; I ring several times; having started three weeks ahead, usually we're down to the wire, with the last tablet or two, before I can even make the forty-minute round trip to get the new prescription, and then it's a dash to the pharmacy to collect it. This all takes place against a backdrop of daily reassurance - yes, I'll phone again, yes, it'll be on its way, don't worry ... This morning, listening to that answerphone, I thought - she sounds nice enough whenever I speak to her - is it just that she has no idea of how important her small piece of paperwork is to those at the other end? Surely if she lived it through my eyes, she'd get her act together? Does she just lack imagination? Opposite end of the scale: someone who always returns calls promptly, answers emails, considers and puts things into action if they might help. In one of our early meetings, when I was fed up and suspicious of all officaldom, I was puzzled by him. I would talk and be met with an intent frowning silence. It took me some time to realise that he was listening to me. What he does probably seems normal to him, but it's had a huge impact, because I was losing hope when I met him. So when my characters do something, they don't act in a vacuum - they bounce off each other and cause repercussions. The 'what if' again - if he says this, how will she react? Where's she coming from, not just in general but today, this morning, now? I'm hoping these 'what ifs' will drive my plot onwards, using my imagination to stand in each character's place. After that, I'm going to drive up and stand at the counter and just ask for the repeat prescription form, because I despair of ever getting that call back!

Try Something New

It's Monday morning. My son is off to work experience and looking apprehensive. Time for me also to try something new and that's learning to post a link. I'm going to see if this works. Monday mornings are hard. My brain has gone elsewhere over the weekend (walks in the rain, driving the children around ...) so I started my writing week just now with a trawl through some of my favourite blogs. Womag's blog linked me to some writing tips from Lydia Jones. I know she's been somewhere else this week - I'm thinking, The People's Friend? - so I was interested and went to read and yes, her tips are great. Let's try and find them. OK, I've tried this twice and it's still not working. Sigh. Technology is never intuitive for me. So let's just do this: http://lydiajones.hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Earn-Money-Writing-Stories-For-Womens-Magazines#comments. Then maybe I'm covered. The one that grabbed me was her discussion of how NOT to use real life events, because this chimed with my own thought processes in my last post. She was suggesting playing the 'What If?' game - you take the real-life event and then say, 'But what if ...' and that leads you off in many new directions which turns a single event into a story that has wider relevance. So I'm off to apply that process to my own half-written story and see how it goes.

That Rewrite

This story, this series of posts, could soon become a serial. So they wanted ANOTHER rewrite. That would be the third. It's lovely to get feedback, it's generous of them to take the time, but there comes a point when saying yes, again, begins to look like desperation to get published. It isn't worth the time. It's a shame - it was a good story (certainly the last time I sent it!) and they keep telling me how much they like it, but if they like it that much, they need to just publish the darn thing! I'm deep into other work now, anyway, for one of my other markets, and if I look round, I'll lose concentration. There's one just awaiting a title and a final re-read, and I'm also halfway through another one. There, I've just seen a way to take the story a stage further and create a whole new level to it. Sometimes you have to write in layers - this one started with a fairly specific idea and was planned to fill a shorter slot - probably 1000 words. However, when you begin from a very literal point, you may find that at first you're telling just that one story and doing so fairly literally. As you edit down to the essential oil of the story, cutting the plot and raising the theme to more prominence, you then see beyond to how you could widen your focus out from that one event. At the moment it's hovering between 1000 and 2000 - I'll wait to see which way it needs to go. One hour till the school bus gets in!

Following Your Children (part two)

OK, so follow your children, but not up a tree. Or, more to the point, down again headfirst.
Trees seem to be a feature of this blog. I climbed trees all the time when I was my daughter's age. I sat up a particularly spectacular pear tree reading on Saturday mornings (Monica Edwards, Antonia Forest, Rosemary Sutcliff, Barbara Willard, KL Peyton ...) I climbed oak trees in the woods and balance-walked along fallen trunks just as she does now. They are warm and living things and infinitely comforting. Oh yes, sign me up to the ranks of tree-huggers any day!
I never, luckily, fell out of one as she did just recently, and now everyone says, to her or to me, 'oh, she won't be doing that again ...'
But she will and why would I stop her? She is her own person and all I can do is teach her safety, and how to balance the sheer joy of living with the risks. She is not just a glass-half-full kind of person, she doesn't even see the glass is anything other than full. She enjoys every new experience of life.
As the paramedics wheeled her into the ambulance, I held her hand and said, with that rather desperate parental attempt at calm, 'You have to remember all of this - it'll be so useful when you next write a story ...' and sure enough, she told me two days later, cast on arm, 'I can't really even say I wish it hadn't happened, because it's all been so interesting. I didn't know what it felt like to fall out of a tree before ...'
I can, however, tell you just what it feels like to watch and that's an experience I'd rather do without.
But can I use it in a story ...?

Teach Your Children - or they will teach you

How many of us, when we have children, think that they will be what we make them? The terrifying feeling of responsibility that goes with a newborn prevents you at first from seeing that right from the moment they land, they are their own people. I was always slightly worried that if I had a boy, I would inevitably end up standing on the side of a football pitch, (I haven't) but I hadn't considered what things I would get to learn about as they grew up. It's like feeding on demand - I do activities on demand.

When people ask how my daughter came to be learning the bassoon - I find myself shrugging and saying, 'Well, I'm not really sure ...' The simple answer is, because it was offered and she wanted to. From the moment she handled one and heard it play, it was her instrument. So I dipped a cautious toe into the world of the Music Mom (Soccer Moms have nothing on some of them for drive and sharp elbowed determination) where saying you play nothing and know less is not an option.

Yesterday I found myself in Trafalgar Square at Maslenitsa - the Russian festival for the end of winter and the beginning of Lent. The Russian alphabet remains a beautiful and elegant mystery to me, but not to my son, who asked for Russian lessons several months ago and was greeted with smiles and encouragement when he tried out his new language on the stall-holders in Trafalgar Square.

Sure, I offer them my own interests - not always successfully, though my son has learned not to say that Joni Mitchell screeches - but I follow where they lead and I end up in some fascinating places.

Rewrites Again

So the email wasn't of acceptance. It was - another rewrite! 'Can you put back in some of what you took out?' I can but I'm struggling to do so within the word limit they want from me.
I'm touched that they are taking the trouble - much easier for a busy fiction ed. simply to reject and move down the pile - and I can rewrite and rework for ever. But will we ever get to a point where we're all happy?
Today's job is to go back and look at the rewrite (two) which I completed before half term got in the way and see if it's going to work. (I'm sure there are other writers who can work during school holidays - but I'm not one of them.)
Wish me luck.

What Where When How

Over at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure today - http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/ -
Sue Purkiss showed us pictures of her notebooks. They are beautiful things, with bright colours and designs. I wanted to stroke them!
My first thought was how dull I felt by comparison. Here on my desk are mine: plain black, Moleskin, the sort that wrap round with an elastic. The elastic is the most important part! I do occasionally put loose sheets in but clearly, as I posted over there, it is more my wild thoughts that need containing and controlling.
Now like most writers, I have a passionate relationship with stationery. Even now, working almost entirely on computer, I look at notebooks, yearn over the feel of a page, study the width of the lines, and the flexibility of the cover, never mind the design that prompted me to pick it up in the first place ... so there must be a reason I choose plain black.
I can only think it's because of the absolute simplicity of it. It says nothing which allows me to say anything. If I had a red leather cover or a woven silk Japanese design, it would set my mood before I even opened the pages.
All my ideas go into these plain black books. Yet my YA novel plans are in a vivid turquoise blue - slim, bendy and no band. I knew it was a departure but the colour overcame me and plannng this book felt like an adventure, a reckless attempt at something new rather than a steady noting of ideas for viable, sellable magazine fiction.
And of course I always used to write in ink. Until my constantly leaking ink pens let me down and I toured the supermarket one day with a blue nose. Black gel pens just about give me that same smooth flow across the page, but it's never quite as satisfying as ink.
How you write, where you write, with what, on what - it shouldn't matter so much but it clearly does.

Rewrites

How long should you give to a rewrite? In financial terms, as little as possible. Short stories never pay well and unless you can turn them over pretty fast, you're not going to get much out of it.
But when you get an email back from a fiction ed. saying, 'we love it but can you cut it, edit it, change the pace ...' - well, what's a perfectionist writer to do? You're halfway to a sale!
Two things - one, you are proving yourself to that editor, and getting yourself more work. Two, you are working on your craft and that's never wasted. Oh, and let's add three - when you're tired, it's easier to edit than to create from scratch!
So I always edit, no matter how long it takes. Finally sent off the rewrite yesterday and I thought it was notably better than my first go. My hero moved from the second page to make his initial appearance in paragraph three; and my emotional storyline was simplified.
My recent way of simplifying is to see the plot in scenes, as if it were a drama. You may have linking paragraphs, but if you try to squeeze too many scenes into a short story, it becomes confusing and bitty, too much of 'and then ... and then ...' So this story was reduced to three meetings between hero and heroine before the happy ending, even though the timeline covered several months and told us what happened for a year before.
Now to wait for the email of ... acceptance?

Sundays are Blue

If Mondays are red (thank you again Nicola Morgan), then Sundays too easily turn blue. They should be a bright and glowing golden yellow, but often they fade into a steely grey blue, a pale blue touched with winter frost. A blue where the ominous shadow of Monday has crept in. A blue that says - today is Sunday, it is meant to be a special day, bright like yellow curtains with sun behind them, ane yet it isn't. All those traditional rhymes tell you how special Sundays are - 'the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good and gay'. Sundays in the religious past may have been a distinct grey colour - grey like an HB pencil. Or, in another tradition, rich with purple and crimson.
But Sundays are touched with tension and expectation and they change colour easily. You need to work hard to keep them yellow. By early evening on an autumn Sunday, the yellow should have turned to a warm amber, the contented colour of a warm fire, tinged with the chestnut brown of polished wood. But when Sunday looks too much like any other day, and the shadow of the week appears, Sunday is a fragmented mosaic made up of sharp shards of blue, grey and frosted white.

Writing Journeys - with apologies to Penelope

Nicola Morgan has a fabulous post over on her blog - http://www.helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/ - about her own personal journey to publication. Twenty one years and lots of low points. What is inspiring about Nicola is that she didn't climb the ladder and then kick it away for those below her - she turns round to try and show those still on the ladder where to put their feet and how to keep going. Too many people operate out of their own insecurities - as I tell my fourteen year old all too often - and very few writers got published easily.

Now after too much TV, I do struggle with the word journey - usually it relates to a few weeks of dancing, skating or eating insects. But let's blot that out and try it here unblemished because a writer's journey can be a long one.

How long have I been writing? My diaries go back to when I was seven, and I have my school Story Book from the same year. I wrote plays and stories and the beginnings of various, heavily derivative books. I lay in bed at night and made up alternative worlds for myself (three sisters in bunk beds joined me regularly to make up the desired foursome that appeared in so many books and for a while I was a twin).

When I was fourteen I wrote my first novel. It was a historical romance and I researched it as thoroughly as I could within the small confines of the borough's library system. It was 80,000 words. I used a thesaurus extensively. I don't think a character ever 'said' - they exclaimed, laughed, sighed, suggested ... I kept lists of the alternatives! There were lots of adverbs too and probably stacks of adjectives. The weather came into it a lot and the dresses were always beautiful. Still, it was there - my first book. I wrote a second a year or so later.

That gave me my first genuine experience of characters coming alive off the page and heading off to do their own thing. In this case, rather dramatically and contrarily, one died. I really wasn't expecting it. She left court - Penelope, her name was, I remember - and went home for a visit. Then she died of the 'sweating sickness' - it ran through Tudor England a few times. Penelope was young and funny; I was fond of her; my heroine's brother was going to marry her - how could she die? All I knew was that she had; and apparently I couldn't change it.

I wrote two more novels in my twenties - both unpublished, both aimed at Mills & Boon. Finally, somewhere around the time I turned 30, I started writing short stories for women's magazines: I have huge affection for The People's Friend, who were the first to publish me, always friendly and supportive. I've since written for a couple more magazines.

The current WIP is a novel for young teens. I always did want to write children's books, after all. The thought that cheers me is when I read of how many authors have a couple of books unpublished in a drawer - I remember the almost forgotten four that I've written. If they are part of my own writing journey, then I'm a long way down the line towards publication!

There is no better way to learn than to write and I loved writing my books. I can write to a brief but I've never been cynical about anything I've written. I've been a magpie all my life - picking up writing tips and experiences of life to use. It all makes up the sum of who I am as a writer. When the characters start to speak for themselves and the story unreels before you as if you already knew it, that's the most exciting feeling in the world; when your writing just flies of its own accord from some deep subconscious place. So everything I've written has been a good part of the journey.

Still - I'm sorry you had to die, Penelope!

Shadows and Silence

In Cambridge last week for a day and saw the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam - Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence.

Four Vermeers and many of his contemporaries. It was all about contrasts: shadows and sunlight, inside and outside, public and private, about the internal and external lives of women, portrayed through their everyday domestic activities. It was the shadows against the sunlight and the silence of the women that stayed with me.

Of course in the shop outside, there were several representations of the painting that is not even there - the Girl with the Pearl Earring. The highlight of this exhibition was the Lacemaker, which came from the Louvre and had a fantastic frame. My daughter, by that time, having spent an intense hour in the museum, had seen enough and was struck by the frame rather than the painting. You might also like to know that the lighting of it is such that you can make wonderful shadow puppets on the wall!

I love the way that artists can say visually what we as writers expend so many words upon. My WIP is all about secrets and silence, inside and out, public and private, the layers that exist in life and how we deal with them.

The exhibition is free, as is entrance to the museum, and it runs until January 15th. Closed Mondays.

Face Blindness

When you read a book, can you see the characters in your mind? Do you know what Jennifer Aldridge looks like and if Kylie changes her hair will you still pick her out in a crowd? For me - no, no and no.

If you have prosopagnosia you are face-blind. Those who have it really intensely may not recognise their own family or friends; they need clues and signals to identify them. But it seems there are a lot of us out there who have it less dramatically and it can take decades to identify and it colours your life in so many ways.

Attaching a label to a puzzle helps in many ways. It makes sense of your confusion and nowadays it gives you a search tag and a route to find others who deal with the world as you do. I'm not the only one! I'm not weird; I'm wired differently.

I'm not the only one who spends conversations distracted by the need to work hard memorising a face, looking for an unchanging identifying feature. One woman I read on a website told how she can memorise shoes and identify her colleagues even from their style of shoes. For others it's jewellery. Me, I get thrown badly when people change their hair, and children who grow are way beyond my skill to keep up.

I first knew I had a problem when I was working. I would go into offices, meet a bunch of new people and never know who I was supposed to nod and smile at when I passed them in a corridor. I once went to a training session and on my return from lunch shared a lift with another woman; she chatted away so I responded in kind. Of course, she walked along the same corridor, into the same room, and sat down ... next to me. She hadn't been opposite me so I hadn't been able to study her face closely and I had no idea I had been sitting by her for three hours that morning.

My defence mechanism is a happy puppy approach - smile at everyone. Living in a small village you're meant to do that anyway. It can cause problems in a big city. I'm expert at maintaining conversations when I have no idea who I am talking to and even my children are learning to cover for me.

Social situations are scary. You see a Royal Wedding Street Party; I see a bewildering group of half-familiar faces and - worse yet - they will all expect me to remember them later in the street. I stayed indoors and let my husband do the socialising for our household.

Most embarrassing moment? When going round a small museum. A volunteer guide upstairs was unable to answer a question and suggested I ask the woman at the door. I did so - but it was the same woman, as she had moved positions by the time I got there. My son, who can picture faces he has seen only for seconds and identify them years later, was awestruck with horrified laughter. I was utterly embarrassed. People take it personally - that you are saying they are not valuable enough for you to remember; that you are rude and self-obsessed.

Now armed with my label, sometimes, with new acquaintances that I feel I can trust, I apologise in advance. 'Please say hello if I don't recognise you next time ...'

My label also explained another huge puzzle for me. Why, as an avid reader and writer, could I never picture faces? At school we would study descriptive passages and they were a blank to me. I can dissect a character and its motives but why could I never see a face in my mind? Why could I never describe a face other than by cliches and specifics - dark eyes, dimples, blonde hair? My characters have no image in my mind; I cannot see them.

I have thought of putting up a photograph of someone suitable, clipped from a magazine, but that might confuse my imagination. And I would still be unable to describe them, even staring at that frozen face; the longer I stare, the more the features puzzle me.

When I went on holiday alone once, long ago, for three weeks, I took a photo of my husband with me, saying I would need it to recognise him at the airport on my return. I wasn't entirely joking. My children ask me to shut my eyes and picture faces - a teacher, a neighbour, themselves. I see frozen images from photographs if I'm lucky.

But I can hear a voice - is this why I love radio? - and I can remember the feel of my children, the smell of them, the sense of them. I can understand them and love them. They are the faces I know best, blurred though they may be.

But today my character, here on my screen, is getting to know another character, who is important to him. He's going to see her, he's going to react to her. I am struggling to see her through his eyes and show her to my reader. I am learning how she moves, how she talks, how she feels. But I cannot see her face. No labels help me there.

Homework

When my son was younger and doing homework, it was a physical struggle as much as a mental one for him. He would twist and turn in his chair, pull away from the work on the desk or computer in front of him. The less he understood, the more his body wriggled and contorted. As he resisted it, spinning in confusion, he physically expressed his incomprehension and frustration. There are days I feel like that and this is one of them. I go back and forth to my WIP, I flip between screens, I get up and wander about the house, I eat chocolate. (And that's without the cleaning you've heard about before - today I did the bathroom!) My willow is almost horizontal today in the wind and there are occasional crashes from the patio and down the side of the house, which I try not to think about. I want to go out and blow away like a leaf in the sunshine and wind, not sit here and fight with words. Failing that, I will go and get another piece of chocolate cake.
But, hey, I sold two stories last week - can't be all bad.

Rejection Bubbles

When the email drops into your box from the fiction ed's secretary, you know it's rejection before you even open it. At least they have answered and given you a brief reason; I appreciate their time. But they still said no, and darn it, it was a good story.
When you look for other homes for the good story, you realise how few there are - how many magazines are no longer running fiction. This means we are all chasing the same shrunken market and you have to raise your game more and more to get the sales. You have to write your absolute best each time, each word; you have to have the sheer energy of conviction and resolution, of pleasure and drive. You cannot do this half-heartedly, or anxiously, or full of self-doubt. It isn't just self-belief, either, but a connection with the world around you that drives good writing, interest and joy in the people and events that occur daily. It is the quirky and fresh view.
But today I was tired and there have been too many rejections lately. So today I tidied. If in doubt, I always tidy. There are times when it isn't procrastination but necessary displacement and a use for frustrated energy. Tomorrow I can go back to writing when the rejection becomes another in the pile and I can pick myself up. At least I'll have a very tidy chest of drawers when I start to write again and maybe something will have bubbled up in the space I left in my mind today.

Three things

Three things I missed yesterday:
- a phone call; a parcel; a chat with a neigbour
Three things I saw yesterday:
- heaped up clouds full of sun; a moon by daylight; a dress with a geometric print
Three things I felt yesterday:
- contentment; laughter; pain
Three things I did yesterday:
- clean; cover books in sticky back plastic; write.

Standing on the Edge of the Pool

So do you walk in slowly, letting the water lap up slowly round you, shivering as it slops higher than you expected? Why is your waist colder than your legs? Or do you go for it, diving into the water and coming up cold, engulfed by salt, hair in your eyes, laughing and gasping and abandoned to physical sensation?
Do you clean your kitchen windows, reorganise your cupboard to fit in the new frying pans, repot the spider plants, look at the clock? Or do you sit at your computer and open the pages that can engulf you in their ideas?

Muse in the Long Grass

The muse is out there. It's been in the long grass all summer, snoozing while the weeds grew up around it and the red ants tunnelled past it.
The muse is such a delicate, fussy little creature. Maybe it needs a good talking to, rather than all this gentle handling. It seems there are many things it doesn't like: children's games, sewing, noise, clutter, sunshine, sand, washing up, dust, letters from the bank, pale faces, unmade beds, potato blight, wrapping paper.
It needs to toughen up. It's September now. New school year and the muse needs a timetable.

I will sing you a song

'I will sing you a song no one sang to me; may it keep you good company ...'

Today's blog comes from a song - Everything Possible - by a folk singer called Roy Bailey (the album is What you Do With What You've Got, as you rush to Google it) and I have thought about why that line caught at me, snagged my thoughts as I listened. The song is a lullaby, sung to a child to tell them that they can be anything they want, grow up to live any way they wish, and that you will always love them whatever choices they make. It is witty and warm-hearted and very much a real-life alternative to the songs Written to Inspire - the sort which all too often are played in school assemblies and at which my daughter pulls faces when she's made to sing them.
That line 'I will sing you a song no one sang to me ...' In it, I see a parent full of dreams for their child, but equally full of their own uncertainties, aware of their shaky foundations but determined that their child will have self-assurance. So often I meet women - like me - who admit that they can't drive on motorways, can't speak in public, are scared of heights or planes or water or spiders or large black beetles, who hate leaving answerphone messages and reversing down country lanes. I know them all and some of those fears are mine. We all have children and we all want our children to be more than we are, to go forward with the self-assurance we lack. We give our children terrific messages that we can't seem to take on ourselves.
Some of us want to be writers. Some of us have children who want to be writers. One of the reasons I take my own children to see authors speak in public is to prove to them that everything IS possible. Look, authors are people. They sign books, they make jokes, they talk, they sometimes fluff their words. They don't drop into the world fully-formed; they are all different. They come to writing by different routes but it is a real job held by real people and it is as possible as being a nurse or a computer technician.
When I was a child, authors were a few words on the back of a Puffin paperback. Once I wrote to one, Monica Edwards, and got an answer - I was utterly amazed. I can no longer find that precious letter but I can still remember the beautiful handwriting. I named my son after a children's book, such was the power of the words I read as a child. I always wrote but had no idea how to start turning myself into a writer.
Now my children have websites, blogs, author tours and signings. As I continue to make reality of my own childhood dreams, I make sure my children know it's possible for them too. It's a job, it's a business like any other. If you work, you can get better at it; if you try hard and learn, you have more chance of success.
I am singing them the song no one sang to me; may it keep us all good company.

Poke! Or how I didn't learn to love Facebook.

Poke is the name of a very silly game that my daughter and I played when she was small. She would hide under the soap bubbles in the bath and stick little bits of her up - a tiny finger or toe - and I had to spot them and poke them before they vanished back underneath. She would play this for hours so we had to institute rules - scores of 10, for example - or we'd be there till the water was cold and her skin, so soft that you could hardly feel it when you stroked it, was all crinkly.
Now poke is apparently something you do on Facebook. I found this yesterday and asked my son what it meant. He is on Facebook every day - of course he won't allow me to be his Facebook friend which is a relief, though I wouldn't tell him that. I don't think I could cope with my inbox being cluttered with the ceaseless white noise chatter. Though I do find it very useful to peer over his shoulder and pick up some teen-speak and teen-thoughts for my WIP.
So poke represents facebook to me - it is apparently something you do for no reason. You poke someone to say hi, I'm here. I can poke my son, even though we're not 'friends'.
I am not a Facebook person. I have myself a page, because I felt that I have to understand this - to stay in my children's world, to stay in the world of 2011. I have tried but I don't seem to enter its world.
For my son, the aim is to have as many friends as possible - he and his friends count their score, try to surpass each other, sign up almost anyone who offers, just to up their score. For me and several of my contemporaries, our scores are in single figures!
It's all about what you understand by privacy or by friendship. Even among my close friends, I will talk to one about some issue and another about something different. They are interested in different things which is they are varied and individual people. For me to put out a message which could apply to all my close friends, plus to all the people I vaguely know, or my children's friends' parents - I would have to come down to the lowest common denominator to find something to say that would be interesting to all and offensive to no one and I don't want to do that. For me, changing the conversation is what makes each friendship personal and special. Facebook friendship is a different thing altogether - all friends, of all levels, the ones you share your soul with and the ones you chat to at the school gates, are all levelled out together.
And privacy - now again, I discovered that my son's privacy settings mean that if one of his friends comments on a post on his wall, their friends can see both the comment and the original post. So complete strangers and people that he doesn't even like can see his comments. Nothing he puts out there is private.
When I learned this, I realised that teenagers now have a completely different concept of privacy. He finds it odd that I should think that strange. Their life with social networking is lived so publicly. Looking over my son's shoulder has told me some surprising things about other teenagers I know only slightly. One posted a list of 'things you don't know about me' - some really quite personal things, of the type I would have shared at her age with my closest friends only, or my diary. All teenagers are in the stage where they value their peer group, they want to belong, they turn outwards from their nuclear family to their contemporaries - that's normal. But now they must surely live their lives as a reflection of everyone else's views, when their thoughts are out there, their activities held up for open approval or comment.
I am fascinated by how they handle their lives with this new element. I envy them the way they can keep in touch - I think of university friends I have lost touch with and how we could have stayed in contact. But then again, how do you lose the people you no longer want to know?! Watching my son handle his social networking life is teaching me a whole new world. It intrigues me but I don't think I can really go there.